Blog do Curso de Medicina da Universidade Estadual de Maringá para a discussão de temas de Educação Médica, Educação das Profissões da Saúde e áreas correlatas.
Blog of University of Maringá Medical School for the discussion of issues of Medical Education, Health Professions Education and related areas.

terça-feira, 16 de agosto de 2016

Higher Education in South Africa

An Open Letter to the State President and the Ministers of Higher Education and Finance

Save our public universities

We, academics of South African universities, call on our government to address the funding crisis in higher education.

A key strategy that post-apartheid governments undertook to reduce
race and class inequality after apartheid was to substantially increase
access to universities in South Africa. Between 1994 and 2014, the
number of students in our public universities more than doubled.(1)
During the same period the proportion of black students at universities
increased from 52% to 81% of the student population.(2) We have welcomed
the massification and deracialisation of access to universities as a
necessary democratisation of higher education after apartheid, and as
our contribution to building a better society.

The problem is that massification has not been matched by adequate
funding. Year on year we have seen a decrease in real terms of
government funding to public universities. The effect of this has been
to create conditions of austerity in universities, as well as to force
universities to grow their revenue by increasing tuition fees and ‘third
stream’ income. Despite increases in NSFAS, high student fees continue
to cause exclusions and our students are increasingly stressed by
mounting debt, which has risen staggeringly since the mid-1990s.(3)
Public universities have thus been put in slow decline: the quality of
teaching and infrastructure of our institutions of higher learning is
deteriorating because of long-term austerity, and this has been
accompanied by a submission to privatisation and debt.

Our public universities can in fact barely be called public, with
national government subsidies to university budgets falling from an
already low 49% in 2000 to 40% in 2012.(4) This has placed enormous
pressure on the maintenance and improvement of core educational
infrastructure such as laboratories, libraries, lecture theatres and
student residences. Furthermore, staff:student ratios have continuously
increased because the employment of full-time academic staff has not
matched increases in student numbers. There is also a growing tendency
to casualise academic labour through short-term appointments, which has
led to the exploitation especially of younger academics, while
undermining the quality of teaching, and increasing the administrative
burden on full time academic staff. Crucially, casualisation and
increased workloads at universities undermine our research capacity. The
impact of high quality original research on national development cannot
be overstated, and the threat to research capacity has enormous
consequences for the future of our country.

Lack of investment in our public universities is not only a national
crisis, but has negative effect on our standing in Africa. Since the end
of Apartheid, our universities have trained cohorts of postgraduate
students from the region and across the continent. South Africa’s
tertiary institutions currently educate many of the continent’s best
students, who are increasingly turning to South African universities as
Africans are de facto excluded from British and North American
institutions. Investing in our universities would maintain our
reputation on the continent, create strong connections between future
African leaders, and produce goodwill and opportunities for South Africa
in decades to come.

The Council on Higher Education, established by the Department of
Higher Education and Training itself, argues that despite the fact that
‘higher education in South Africa has been regarded as a key to social
and economic development… its expenditure on higher education is much
lower than desirable or needed.’(5) South Africa spends a mere 0.6% of
GDP on its universities, lagging behind many other countries (Russia at
1.8%, Argentina and 1.4, India at 1.3%).(6)

With government not funding in full the financial shortfall resulting
from the 0% fee freeze in 2016, universities have had to cut costs
further from their already-stretched budgets. This has impacted all of
us in our daily work, but Historically Black Universities have been the
hardest hit because of a historical deficit in reserves and reduced
access to private income. Thus, a further hierarchisation of our
universities is taking place, compounding older race and class divisions
in higher education.

In short, our universities are chronically underfunded. We are being
threatened with cuts to our teaching programmes, our research budgets,
hiring is being frozen, posts down-graded, and the core functions of
universities are being put under threat. We have reached a limit. We
simply cannot weather any further cuts without jeopardizing the academic
project.

As academics responsible for the quality of South African
universities, we call on government to take seriously the worth of
university education as a public good, and to reverse the decline in
public higher education by substantially increasing the state subsidy to
universities.

Circulated by the academics of the School of Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand

Student numbers rose from 495,000 in 1994 to almost a million
students in 2014. Council on Higher Education. 2016. South African
Higher Education Reviewed: Two Decades of Democracy. Pretoria.

Higher Education South Africa. 2014. South African Higher
Education in the 20th Year of Democracy: Context, Achievements and Key
Challenges, pp.1-2. These numbers do not of course capture the manner in
which institutions remain differentially racialised.

Steyn and De Villiers. 2006. The Impact of changing funding on
higher education institutions in South Africa. Higher Education Monitor,
No.4, March.

PriceWaterhouseCooper, Funding of public higher education
institutions in South Africa.
www.pwc.co.za/en/higher-education/Funding-public-higher-education-institutions-SA.html

Council on Higher Education. 2016. South African Higher Education Reviewed: Two Decades of Democracy. Pretoria.